7    

IN 1923, Leon was studying electrical and technical subjects and helping Uncle Max at the liquor store, hoping to follow in his father’s educational footsteps. I found photographs in his album, including one of a man who seemed to be a teacher. He had a distinguished air, a man with whiskers standing in a garden, a small wooden table before him laden with the stuff of distillation, the burners, bottles, and tubes. The teacher might begin with a liquid of fermented grains, which contained ethanol. This liquid was purified to produce a spirit, the liquor that emerged from the process of separation.

The act of purification was the opposite of life in Vienna. In hard economic times, with inflation rampant and tensions high, new refugees arrived from the east in great numbers. Political groupings struggled to form working governments as conditions conspired to promote nationalist and anti-immigrant feelings, along with a rising tide of anti-Semitism. A local National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which was formed in Austria in 1918, merged with its German counterpart. The leader was a charismatic Austrian named Adolf Hitler.

In the summer of 1923, two weeks after attending the wedding of his sister Laura to Bernard Rosenblum, Leon returned to Lwów to obtain a passport. Even after a decade in Vienna, he discovered that he didn’t have Austrian nationality. An obscure treaty signed in June 1919 on the same day as the Treaty of Versailles, the Polish Minorities Treaty, made Leon a Polish citizen.

Leon’s Polish passport photograph, 1923

That treaty had been forced on Poland, imposing obligations to protect minorities. An early precursor to modern human rights conventions, Article 4 provided, in effect, that anyone born in Lwów before the treaty was signed in 1919 would be deemed a Polish citizen. There were no forms to be completed, no applications to be made. “Ipso facto and without requirement of any formality,” the treaty declared, Leon and hundreds of thousands of other citizens of Lwów and Żółkiew and other lands became Polish citizens. A surprise and a nuisance, this legal quirk would later save his life and that of my mother. My own existence owed something to Article 4 of this Polish Minorities Treaty.

Leon had left Austrian Lemberg on the eve of World War I, before it was plunged into a murderous conflict between Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. By the time he returned to collect a passport, the city was a thriving Polish metropolis, filled with the rasping sound of trams and the “aromas of patisseries, fruit sellers, colonial stores and Edward Riedl and Julius Meinl’s tea and coffee shops.” The city entered a period of relative stability after the end of the wars against the Soviets and the Lithuanians. On June 23, 1923, the Police Directorate of Lwów issued Leon’s new Polish passport. It described a young man with blond hair and blue eyes, although the photograph showed him in glasses and dark hair. A natty dresser, he wore a dark jacket, a white shirt, and a strikingly modern tie, with thick horizontal stripes. Although he was nineteen years old, his profession was listed as écolier, schoolboy.

He spent the rest of the summer in Lwów, with friends and family, including his mother, who still lived on Szeptyckich Street. In Żółkiew, he would have visited Uncle Leibus and the large, extended family on Piłsudski Street, in a wooden house a little north of the great synagogue (decades later the street was a muddy path, the house long gone). Leon could take to the hills around the town, passing through fine local woods of oaks and birches on its eastern edge, known as the borek. This was where the children of Żółkiew often played, on the wide plain between low-lying hills, along the main road to Lwów.

In August, Leon visited the Austrian consulate on the first floor of 14 Brajerowska Street, near the university. In these rented rooms, a last bastion of Austrian authority, he was issued the stamp that allowed a single return trip to Austria. The Czechoslovak consulate, located close to the law faculty, offered a transit visa. Amid the hubbub, Leon might have passed two other young men on the city streets, early on career paths that would lead to significant roles in the Nuremberg trial: Hersch Lauterpacht had left the city in 1919, to study in Vienna, and might have been back to visit his family and take forward his candidacy for the chair in international law at Lwów University; Rafael Lemkin, a student at the university’s law faculty, was living near Malke, in the shadow of St. George’s Cathedral. This was the formative period, touched by events in the city and Galicia, in which the ideas on the role of the law in combating mass atrocity were being formed.

Leon left Lwów at the end of August. He traveled by train to Kraków, a ten-hour journey, then on to Prague and Czechoslovakia’s southern border, at Břeclav. On the morning of August 25, 1923, the train pulled in at the Nordwestbahnhof. From there, Leon walked the short distance to Gusta’s home on Klosterneuburger Strasse. He never returned to Lwów or Żółkiew and, as far as I know, never saw any member of that family again.